No sympathy for the devils

Future generations will look back on the 20th Century as the time of genocide and rock and roll. The extent of this genocide is almost beyond belief: not just the 20 or so million killed systematically by Nazi Germany and a similar number by the Japanese Empire, but also the 45 million killed in China’s ‘Great Leap Forward’, the 10 million in the contrived famines associated with the ‘collectivisation’ of agriculture in the Soviet Union, and millions in Cambodia, Armenia, Nigeria, Rwanda, and many other places. Industrial scale warfare resulted in tens of millions more deaths, with new ‘weapons of mass destruction’, starting with poison gas devised by the German Empire in the First World War, and nuclear and biological weapons introduced to the world by the USA. Agent Orange, which was used by the USA in Vietnam, resulted in half a million deaths and millions of disabilities, increased risk of diseases such as cancer, and birth defects among the civilian population.

How can we explain this utter horror, this evil? The source of evil has been attributed through the ages to the devil or to devils. In Hollywood, the devil is portrayed as a deformed and deranged monster. This is a comforting depiction because it suggests that the source of evil lies outside ourselves, and that normal people are incapable of evil unless seduced into it by an alien being. This depiction of the devil as alien easily slides into xenophobia, leading people to believe that their society can be cured of evil if only they are able to eliminate foreigners, blacks, jews, communists, or some other defined minority.

But there is another quite different vision of the devil - the devil as a gentleman, suave, charismatic and persuasive, and very much one of us. This is  the version that appears in one of the 20th Century’s greatest rock and roll songs ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in 1968 and recorded by the Rolling Stones. In this song, Lucifer proclaims his wealth and taste. Like sophists everywhere, he argues for moral relativity: “Just as every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners saints”, and for universal self-blame: “I shouted out ‘Who killed the Kennedys?’, when after all it was you and me.” Yet at the root is a love of death and despair: “I watched with glee as your kings and queens fought for ten decades for the gods they made”.

This is a lot of work for one devil, and it is not surprising that many sources (such as Milton’s Paradise Lost) identify a pandemonium of devils, each of which characterises a particular kind of evil. These include Mammon, who exalts wealth, persuading us to feast while others starve. Beelzebub represents the arrogance of power, tempting those in high office to crush their rivals to maintain personal supremacy. Astaroth is the devil of accusers and inquisitors - those who enforce conformity with torture and death, while  Moloch is the demon of religious cruelty, persuading those with religious faith to stone miscreants to death, burn unbelievers at the stake and crash aeroplanes into skyscrapers. Finally, there is Belial, who works to stir up lies and hatred, and “loves vice for itself”.

Belial, like all the other devils, walk among us, or rather pass by us in their chauffer-driven cars and their private jets. They run giant chains of ‘news media’ which promote pornography and inculcate hatred of their political rivals, they manage wealthy corporations which employ workers in the Third World on starvation wages and pollute the landscape, they go to war in the name of security and ensure those they capture are tortured and murdered. They glory in personal power and crush and destroy others as an act of pleasure. They succeed because we are weak and easily impressed by ‘wealth and taste’.

Meet the new boss - same as the old boss

Politics is theatre, and those who strut and declaim on the stage do not usually write their own script. The more sober of politicians’ autobiographies acknowledge this. Looking back on their career, their authors describe their achievements in limited terms - getting a new law passed against the odds, changing public perceptions of a problem, or perhaps averting a crisis. Read the political memoirs of the former Labour MP Chris Mullin, and you find ambition for office tempered by a realisation that a minister has little or no influence on policy, and spends his time reading out (usually badly-written) speeches prepared for him by civil servants. The actual job of politicians is in reality a salesmen - to sell policy to Parliament and the public. What better person to do this than a natural actor (Tony Blair) or a public relations professional (David Cameron).

There are of course politicians who can claim, with some justification, to have changed the direction of the country. Margaret Thatcher blundered into the Falklands War, and pushed for the Poll Tax, while Tony Blair became unpopular in Britain but popular in Washington by promoting war as an alternative to diplomacy. However, many of the policies associated with a senior politician predate their time in office and bind their successors. All British governments for the past 20 years have promoted the interests of  the financial sector over those of manufacturing industry, have sought to undermine employment rights (calling this ‘flexibility of labour’), and have facilitated the plundering of the public purse by management consultants, IT firms and the PFI/privatisation complex.

Chris Mullin’s memoirs are also a guide here. They show that each government ministry (or part of a ministry) is at the hub of a set of stakeholders. These usually comprise key business and financial interests rather than the wider public. The ties between ministries and stakeholders are held together by exchanges of senior staff and the availability of well-remunerated positions for senior civil servants and politicians when they leave office. This works to create great continuity in public policy, which may only occasionally bend to public protest. Note that this is not a conspiracy theory - the policies of different ministries or parts of ministries may conflict, resulting in a policy stalemate. The Iraq War enquiry reveals major divisions between and within military, intelligence and diplomatic services. The one group not included in these debates was the British public, despite a million-strong march on the eve of war.

An example of this continuity is the reform of the NHS proposed by our coalition government. This is presented as a radical innovation, but bears all the marks of every other management reform (or ‘redisorganisation’) of the NHS since the 1980s. As usual, it is hyped as devolving power while actually centralising control. The recipients of the supposed devolved power in this case (as in 1997) are consortiums of general practitioners, but the central NHS commissioning board will have extensive and expanded powers to make sure the GP’s do what they are told. The consortiums will certainly not have much power over what they commission. Like all the NHS reforms since the early 1990s, this one confirms the steady drift to the marketisation of healthcare services. Consortiums will be required to choose the lowest price tendered, and providers will be able to compete on price. Needless, to say, even this limited power can not be contemplated without diverting funds to the giant management consultancy combines, who will move in to manage the commissioning consortiums, supposedly on behalf of the GPs. The previous two heads of commissioning in the NHS have gone to work for more than a pittance with KPMG. I would not of course suggest that the current one had this in mind when the NHS awarded a large contract to KPMG for commissioning in London.

Finally, this re-organisation, like all its predecessors in the last 20 years, has been rushed, with many details not worked out, no feasibility trials, and no effective project management. Why is this? I think there is a Darwinian explanation. After so many re-organisations, the NHS has become a bizarre ecological niche, to which NHS managers have evolved in response. Only those most able to respond rapidly and with enthusiasm to the latest shift of policy (in whatever direction it takes), espy the best time to jump ship, and rapidly create a new mini-empire for themselves can hope to survive. They naturally shape their environment to suit these survival skills, which means ever more redisorganisations. Each one of course is applauded by the well-rewarded management consultants, the usual squad of compliant social policy academics, and the politicians who read out the speeches written for them.

Read also: http://stuartcumella.blogspot.com/2009/12/pic-complex.html

Give them your money

You do not earn much - just enough to put aside some savings. Each penny of those savings is a product of hard work done and pleasures foregone. What do you do with these savings to protect them? One option is to place them in the trust of a very wealthy man. He tells you that he will gamble your money on unsafe schemes which he does not understand and which have failed spectacularly in the recent past. Irrespective of whether these make money or not, he will award himself and his friends a huge ‘bonus’ on top of his already magnificent salary, drawn from your savings and the savings of people like yourself. Do you trust your savings to him? Of course you do - because you have put your money in banks all your life.

There are other options of course. You could put your sayings in a mutual, like the Co-operative Bank. Or governments could break up the grossly-oversized ‘high street banks’, regulate how much bankers pay each other from our savings, and force them to invest in British enterprises rather than derivatives or other forms of speculation. Fat chance of that though.

Climbing up on Woodbury Hill

 Every hill in the English countryside has a name and a history - sometimes several histories. Look North from the crest of the Malvern Hills at the Worcestershire Beacon and you see a long ridge of hills, some with barrow mounds on their crest, and one (Woodbury Hill) with an iron age hill fort. This fort is now covered by a plantation of pine trees, but the steep ditches of the old embankments remain. Through the trees, and along the ridge to the South are some of the greatest views in the English Midlands. East are the great ruins of Witley Court, once the home of the dowager queen Adelaide. Beyond this is the wide valley of the River Severn, and the far hills of the Cotswold edge. West are the folded hills of Herefordshire, on to the Welsh border mountains. North is the long wooded ridge of Abberley Hill and the strange clock tower at Abberley Hall

There are over two thousand hill forts in Britain, but there is uncertainty about when they were built, whether they were occupied throughout the year, and when they fell into disuse. But most are about 2500 years old, and were deserted after the defeat of the native British by the Roman Army. Much later, Woodbury and Abberley Hills were the scene of a great non-battle. In 1405, Owain Glyn Dwr led his Welsh army with its French contingent against King Henry IV. Glyn Dwr’s men camped on Woodbury Hill, facing the English camp on Abberley Hill, across the narrow valley now the site of Great Witley village. No battle took place because both armies were unassailable on their hilltops, and after five days of challenges, Glyn Dwr headed back to Wales.

Over 200 years later, another civil war led to a further gathering on Woodbury Hill. On 5 March 1645, a gathering of a thousand ‘clubmen’ met on Woodbury Hill to pass a declaration which they presented to the Royalist High Sheriff of Worcestershire. The clubmen were local militias which were organised independently of the two sides in the Civil War, with the aim of defending their families and possessions against either army. Eventually, however, they sided with the better-disciplined Parliamentary army, and took to harassing the Royalists.

There have thankfully been no civil wars in England since the 17th century, and Woodbury Hill remains a quiet place to remember great events.
See also:
England's Great Divide Walk

Mind and Society

One of the great unresolved questions in philosophy and neuroscience is the nature of mind. Many textbooks in these subjects begin their discussions with Descartes, who proposed a separation between matter (which occupies space) and mind (which involves thought and does not occupy space). Most discussions focus on how these two substances could interact, since the a person’s mind can clearly lead to physical action. One increasingly dominant view (held by ‘materialists’) is that the mind is located in a series of chemical processes in the brain.

Less attention seems to have been given by philosophers and neuroscientists to the slightly different problem of the location of society. This might at first sight seem a puzzling question because the institutions of society and government seem solid and permanent - so permanent in fact, that we give them the names of the buildings that are associated with their headquarters. We speak of the ‘White House’ or ‘10 Downing Street’ to designate their current political inhabitants and their staff. Or, extending the metaphor, we talk of the ‘structure’ of society. Yet this solidity is an illusion because apparently ‘solid’ governments and societies can disappear almost overnight. The German Democratic Republic had large armed forces, a secret police with records on the majority of the population and a network of informers (one for every 6.5 citizens), no overt opposition, and was defended against its enemies (and those of its inhabitants who wished to live elsewhere) by a wall, fences, minefields and machine-guns. Despite surviving with little change for 40 or so years, this ‘structure’ blew away in the wind in a few weeks in 1989.

This indicates that, however solid they may appear to be, societies are generated in the minds of individual people. For years, they wake up each morning and go about their daily routines, thereby maintaining patterns of behaviour that sustain those in authority over them. They may, from time to time, reflect on their lives and decide individually or in small groups to look for other work, seek a new partner, or move to another part of the country. These decisions will take account of the rewards and sanctions for alternative courses of action. On a few occasions, they may act in accord with many others to make a sudden and major change in their daily habits. This will result in attempted political uprisings, outbreaks of mass violence, adherence to a new religious order, support for a new form of music, and other such revolutions.

If society is in people’s minds, then where is it located? The materialist approach is unlikely to be helpful. Even if it became possible to interpret the chemical processes of the brain with greater sophistication than with the current fMRI scanners, all we would find in each individual would be sets of hopes, fears, expectations, habits of thought and expectations of routine behaviours. This would give us some understanding of how that individual functioned in society, but not much else. Instead, we need to think of societies and other human institutions as sets of recurring patterns of human behaviour that are akin to Descartes’ understanding of the mind. They are sustained by thought but are not in themselves a material substance. Perhaps then we could stop talking about organisations of people as if they were blocks of stone and concrete.

See also: Working in the Machine

The Quality of Gulag Life

In his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn drew on his own experience to describe life in a Soviet prison camp in the Arctic. This involved almost unimaginable suffering: imprisoned without any prospect of release for what would not be a crime in any reasonably free society; forced to work long hours in subzero temperatures; appalling food and accommodation; and a probable early death from illness, exhaustion, or murder by the guards. Yet the hero of the book looks back on his day with some satisfaction:
    “Shukhov went to sleep fully content. He’d had many strokes of luck that day: they hadn’t put him in the cells; they hadn’t sent the team to the settlement; he’d pinched a bowl of kasha at dinner; the team-leader had fixed the rates well; he’d built a wall and enjoyed doing it; he’d smuggled that bit of hacksaw blade through; he’d earned something from Tsezar in the evening; he’d bought that tobacco. And he hadn’t fallen ill. He’d got over it. A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day” (pp142-143).

This extract tells us something about how people assess the quality of their own lives. Almost everybody would rate the life of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov in the most negative terms, even compared with that of ordinary citizens of the Soviet Union at that time. Yet he had adapted to his way of life, and was able to win sufficient minor triumphs over adversity to regard it as ‘almost a happy day’. There is therefore sometimes a difference between a person’s quality of life rated by an observer, and that person’s own sense of well-being.

Researchers call the first of these an ‘objective measure’ of quality of life, compared with a person self-rating, which is termed ’subjective’. But these phrases are misleading because ‘objective’ measures are simply the subjective assessments of others about what constitutes the good life. Researchers may poll lots of people in a particular society about what they wish from life and hence obtain some numerical score for quality of life, but in the end they are just measuring the extent to which a particular individual conforms to other people’s subjective assessments of what makes them happy. Needless to say, some people willingly choose a way of life that would not appeal to all of us - as monks spending a spartan life of prayer, as soldiers living in barracks facing daily danger, and so on.

Of course, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov did not choose to be in a gulag, but his life there had narrowed his awareness of the alternatives. This may have been essential for psychological survival, but would also have made adaptation after release particularly difficult. Like Brooks, the elderly released prisoner in The Shawshank Redemption, suicide would have seemed a reasonable option. This raises questions about whether we should give preference to people’s own assessments of their preferred way of life over that of ‘objective’ opinion. This already happens routinely when the person in question is deemed unable to make a rational decision because of childhood, mental illness or severe learning disability. But none of us ever make a rational decision about what we wish from life, in the sense of considering and weighing all the possible alternatives. Instead, most of us choose between the limited range of alternatives we know about or just copy what other people do, while a few reckless souls leap into the unknown.

Does this mean that most of us are living in a gulag of our own making? For some people, this is true. It is possible to meet people who live narrow and restricted lives without poetry, the excitement of sport and the stimulation of friendship and good conversation. This can happen even when there are the financial means to live otherwise. My advice for escaping from such a gulag is to travel to new places when you can, try out new foods, learn new languages, make an effort to meet different kinds of people, read more and watch less television.

Read: Solzhenitsyn A (1963) One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Penguin, Harmondsworth.

See also:

Looking down on others' needs

I-Spy van Gogh (and a Rodin)

When I was young, I collected train numbers, bus numbers, and also filled in I-Spy books. Each I-Spy book covered a particular topic such as vehicles, aeroplanes, birds, insects and so on. Each would include information about a particular car, animal etc, and space to record where you first saw it. The book awarded marks for each first sighting, graded according to rarity. I Spy books still exist, glossier than they were in the past, but still small enough to fit into a boy’s pocket.

I-Spy books are for collectors, but collectors of memories rather than objects. The dominant drive is the same in both cases: the desire to accumulate for its own sake. However, the I-Spy motive is the most innocent form of accumulation. The accumulation of memories does not usually destroy what is being accumulated, or deny others its pleasures. Collectors of memories do not steal or hoard great works of art, but view them in galleries and tick them off the their mental list.

I suspect that the I-Spy motive drives a substantial proportion of those that visit art galleries and museums. There are of course other reasons for seeing great works of art - to be inspired, to look with awe at a work completed with great skill, or to understand the mind of the artist. However, these more aesthetic objectives are hard to achieve when visiting the major art galleries. This is because crowds gather round the most familiar paintings because they are famous, because they wish to tick them off in their mental I-Spy book of great paintings.

I found this to be true last month in the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The museum was packed, with people gathering around the most well-known pictures. Van Gogh was a particularly obliging artist for collectors because he often painted multiple pictures of the same subject - nine different pictures of sunflowers in a vase, now all spaced round the world in different collections. How many people would appreciate these paintings if they were not in all the art books, and sold for vast sums to museums? Some of the early paintings by van Gogh certainly struck me as dismal efforts.

The potato eaters is a grotesque cartoon of peasant life. The peasants were painted as ugly semi-animal figures with outsize hands and noses. This was supposedly a work in honour of manual labour, but it is degrading. I suspect that the peasants who were models for the picture would have preferred to be seen in their Sunday best, to have their dreams and hopes respected.

A pair of pictures elsewhere in the museum also the limitations of van Gogh’s early works. His view of Paris seemed to me to be an uninspired technical exercise, flat and conveying nothing of the city and its life.

Next to it in the gallery was Bonnard’s view of Montmartre which, like van Gogh’s picture, was painted from the window of a flat. Bonnard’s picture sparkles with city lights in the rain, evoking the excitement of a great city at night. But Bonnard is not as famous as van Gogh, so the I-Spy crowds did not gather around this wonderful picture.

Van Gogh’s later work is of course far more attractive and commercially successful (although sadly only after the artist’s early death). His series of paintings of iris flowers are utterly beautiful and, like many people,  I have a reproductions of one of these on my living room wall. But I was affected much more by the sole sculpture in the Museum by Rodin, of one of the Six Burghers of Calais. This showed the anguish of the senior men of the City, who had agreed to surrender their lives to the besieging English army in exchange for it agreeing not to massacre the inhabitants when the City surrendered. The English king ordered that they walk out of the City gates dressed in rags, wearing nooses around their necks, and carrying the keys to the city and its castle. Rodin’s sculpture portrays the anguish of the starving magistrate, his teeth grit in determination and sacrifice, as he stumbles to surrender and death. These emotions burn our hearts when we think of the lives of our forefathers in Europe who lived through the first half of the 20th Century - the century of genocide and mass murder, the century from hell.

Much more comforting to turn aside and look at sunflowers.